Despite being a very short month, it felt very long, not least because of the rising tide of anti-trans legislation and the unstable and disturbingly warm weather brought on by global warming. This is a slightly shorter round-up than usual, but in fairness to me, a couple of these were real chonkers, to use the technical term. Links go to Bookshop, as usual.

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God, I love this era of Vintage books design.

First up this month was Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which I read at the behest of a friend who played Don Parritt in a recent revival here in town. We are presented in it with Harry’s, a real trashhole of a bar and boarding house, and the array of dedicated alcoholics, burnouts, and bums who live there, awaiting the return of Hickey, a travelling salesman who comes to visit them once or twice a year. But Hickey’s arrival coincides with that of Don Parritt, driven to seek harbor with Larry Slade, a disillusioned fellow-traveller of Parritt’s anarchist mother — and Hickey, when he finally arrives, is acting real weird himself. The play is very long, very dense, and seeded with monologues; it’s also hilarious, blisteringly cruel and disturbingly open about political disillusionment, addiction, and desperation. I’ll admit, both while seeing the play initially and then while reading it, I did suffer a little bit of a mindfuck by virtue of this play being set about as far before its performance as 1989 is from now, if I’m doing my math properly. But all this is just a long way of saying that I loved it a lot and fear I may be in danger of becoming an O’Neill guy, in addition to all the other types of guy I already am.

Next up was Aiden Thomas’ The Sunbearer Trials, the first in a projected duology. The novel follows Teo, a young trans man who is also a second-string demigod as he is, against all odds, chosen to compete to become the Sunbearer, a position that guarantees he will be the savior of Reino del Sol — but also that he will have to sacrifice one of his co-competitors. Thomas, whose Cemetery Boys was an absolute delight, here makes a turn into a secondary-world setting, albeit one that closely matches our own, and by and large, he handles transition well. Teo and his friends, Niya and the younger Xio, are brightly-drawn and engaging, and the story rips right along. It was a fun adventure, and one I’m excited to see continue in the second book, which I think is due later this year.

The one portrait of Kant that everyone uses for everything — and who am I to break with tradition?

The third book in this run of print books is also one of two responsible for this being a relatively light round-up, and it’s Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in J. M. D. Meiklejohn’s 1855 translation (note, though, that the Bookshop link goes to the same translation I read, but not the same edition). As an aside, I’d like to note that this definitely another place where edition makes the difference: Meiklejohn’s translation was fine, I guess, but certainly hampered by a print-on-demand edition, poorly reproducing Meiklejohn’s public-domain work — but that’s on me for getting a cheap one. In any case, Kant’s “first critique” basically puts forward that we know things thanks to faculties beyond pure reason and gave rise to the kind of philosophical idealism that has characterized a fair bit of subsequent Euro-American philosophy. I think. I’ll be honest, this was a very difficult one for me, and the fact that a different edition might have guided me better in understanding how the arguments were constructed suggests that I’ll probably have to make another run at it. In any case, the Philosophize This! guy does a good job of explaining what Kant is trying to do, and I will stop trying. It took me forever, and I still didn’t really get it, and I will move on.

The other big boy in this round-up was actually an audiobook, and a re-read to boot: Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, in Constance Garnett’s very okay translation. In this classic tale, we are introduced to the variously obnoxious Karamazovs: Fyodor, the father, a “sensualist” and sexual predator; Dmitri, the oldest son, a dissolute military man and product of Fyodor’s first marriage; Ivan, the sensitive, intellectual middle son; Alyosha, the youngest of Fyodor’s legitimate children, a would-be monk cast out into the world; and Smerdyakov, Fyodor’s illegitimate son who serves him as a cook. Then Fyodor is murdered; the boys have to deal with the fact that all of them are, at different times, in love with the same two women; there’s a subplot involving some local schoolboys and another involving some local monks. I’m being flippant on purpose, because honestly, reading Dostoevsky for the plot is misguided at best: his novels are, on a very basic level, about people happening to each other. And besides that, there’s a nameless first-person narrator who isn’t really a character but still somehow is privy to everything in the consuming drama of “our town.” It’s lush and pretty brisk in its pacing. I recalled some things happening at different times, but I think that’s because there’s quite a bit of long and relatively gripping set-up at the beginning. I also must add that Garnett’s translation does not serve this one well: her sensibilities are so delicate that it sometimes becomes difficult to keep track of the (many) sordid details, which are more clear in other versions. Still, it was a treat to revisit (much like the other two).

I very rapidly made my way through another audiobook after that: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo, the sequel to Ninth House, her adult debut, which I quite enjoyed. Picking up a few months after the events of the previous novel, we once again see Alex Sterne attempting to navigate her multifaceted life of problems: seeing the dead, going to Yale, working for the secret society of which she is a part, trying to rescue a friend who’s trapped in Hell, and still dodging the long reach of a drug dealer from her troubled past. Bardugo’s gift for pacing is fully on display here, and if a few too many people “slice the air with [their] hand[s],” I am willing to overlook it in the interests of a ripping yarn that offers dark academia with at least a nod to class consciousness. Apparently there’ll be a third one at some point, and I certainly look forward to it.

Next up, I finished Everybody’s Right by Paolo Sorrentino, which I read in Howard Curtis’s English translation after receiving it as a gift from a friend who raved about it. Sorrentino, better known as a director in the anglosphere — This Must Be the Place and The Great Beauty come first to mind — proves a capable and engaging novelist. We follow Tony Pagoda, a singer of schmaltzy tunes, as his career of fucking beautiful women and doing just an absolute shitload of cocaine, while also saying mean things about pretty much everyone, crashes and burns around him. This could have been grim or solipsistic or otherwise not great, but Sorrentino via Curtis avoids this, keeping Tony’s narration bright and snappy, peppered with just enough jaded reflection on life, love, and why he might have just done what he did to suspend the reader in a kind of balancing act between loathing and loving this sopping wet beast of a man.

The cover, which is honestly kind of nothing? I don’t love it.

I close this round-up with a book I technically finished today, but who gives a shit, I know the guy who made the rules and he’s an asshole: Last Exit by Max Gladstone. Cameron recommended it very highly, and I cosign what he said of it. It’s a delight, hitting a nice sweet spot between American Gods and Angelmaker, both of which I loved. And I loved this: Zelda, ten years after she and her friends tried and failed to save the world, attempts to get the gang back together (and maybe save her girlfriend, who was lost to the rot that is eating the world). It was, in many ways, a keyboard smash of stuff I already like — in addition to the comparisons I made previously, I also liked that the magic is mostly math and the main characters are mostly in their 30s, with all the attendant problems of that age. (I’m also in my 30s.) It was an excellent conclusion to the month, and I’m very excited to dig deeper into Gladstone’s back catalog.

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That’s it for February. Follow me and Cameron on Twitter if you want, or on Tumblr if you prefer your social media scroll to be chronological.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, February 2023